We understand the solar system, so why do people still struggle with gender?

People once believed the sun circled the Earth. It was a perfectly sensible model by which they understood the universe. The important word here is “model”. At the time, almost everyone thought that this was accurate. As with our contemporary idea of gender, the model closely matched the observation of physical “reality”.

The philosophers and theologians of the middle ages believed that the sun went around the Earth and that to suggest otherwise was heretical, ungodly and just really, really stupid. Imagine scholars of that age writing on the internet about new theories that the Earth went around the sun – these opinions would read a lot like most of the comments we get today about gender. Basically: “This is just ignoring common sense”; “What is the world coming to?” and “Let’s burn these queer freaks.”

The middle-ages model was based on the principles of Ptolemy, and hundreds of years of celestial observation. Everything worked perfectly well until Copernicus and Galileo gave us the new and exciting heliocentric model. Copernican thought was revolutionary, but then we had Newton, and then Einstein, Bohr and Hawking. We keep observing the universe, and we keep changing the model to fit the observation, not ignoring the data that doesn’t fit. We could also still use geocentrism if we wanted – we would be able to predict solar and lunar eclipses, roughly, but nothing would work properly.

The model of male and female is based on thousands of years of observation of genitalia and the binary qualities of sexual attraction and reproduction. Those were the externally observable facts. They correlated. And, yes, we could remain happy with that.

Source: theguardian